Tremulous
Tremulous is a standalone open source modification of the quake engine, which puts a team of human players up against a team of fast moving, short ranged alien players in a dynamic first person shooter with constantly shifting tactics and base arrangements. Gameplay In tremulous, each team starts out with a base in which they can build on, using a construction kit(humans), or granger(alien builder). Humans can only build on flat surfaces, or surfaces with less than a 45 degree angle, while aliens can build at any angle, even on the walls or ceilings. Telenodes and eggs are the most essential buildings for each team, as players cannot spawn without them, and if no one is alive and no spawns exist, the team loses. The second most important building is the Overmind/Reactor, which controls all buildings except for the eggs/telenodes, and if destroyed no further buildings can be constructed without first rebuilding the Controlling building. Aside from those buildings, humans also have defense computers, tesla generators, machine gun turrets, armouries, and medistations, all which contribute to the team's defensive options. Aliens in turn have boosters, acid tubes, trappers, barricades, and hives. In combat, aliens do far more damage and are far more mobile, but none of them have a decent long ranged attack, forcing them to get within inches of the humans to attack, an odd reversal of typical FPS play. The humans, conversely, have an arsenal of purchasable weapons, all of which but the painsaw and flamethrower have infinite range. They are also given the ability to purchase better armour as the Human Stage grows higher (the maximum stage is 3). The humans tend to travel in packs, because if they allow an alien to get in range, they have almost no chance of survival. Aliens tend to either work solo or in groups of two, waiting around corners for targets to tear into. Any more than two aliens working together is likely to result in a lot of team killing, due to the range at which aliens fight. In addition, larger aliens often accidentally run down smaller aliens while charging away from a fight with low health, making it imperative that the smaller aliens wallwalk while not actively in combat. Alien Classes The aliens main method of becoming more powerful is through the evolution system, in which they exchange evolution points for the ability to turn into a higher level class than they currently are. Aliens gain evolution points by killing humans, and revert to either a dretch (tiny, spider like alien) or a granger (builder) upon death. The following list is of all of the available aliens for standard tremulous (excluding tremx, korx, and some other mods) with a brief description. Name: Granger - Stage needed to obtain: 1 - Cost: 0 Evos - Description: Responsible for building and maintaining all alien structures. Name: Advanced Granger - Stage needed to obtain: 2 - Cost: 0 Evos - Description: Similar to the base Granger, except that in addition to being able to build structures, it has a melee attack, a barb-spit attack, and the ability to crawl on walls. Name: Dretch - Stage needed to obtain: 1 - Cost: 0 Evos - Description: Has a lethal bite and the ability to crawl on walls. Name: Basilisk - Stage needed to obtain: 1 - Cost: 1 Evo - Description: Able to crawl on walls and ceilings. Its melee attack is often most effective combined with the ability to grab its foes. Name:Advanced Basilisk - Stage needed to obtain: 2 - Cost: 2 Evos - Description: In addition to basic Basilisk abilities, the Advanced Basilisk sprays a poisonous gas which disorientates any nearby humans. Name: Marauder - Stage needed to obtain: 1 - Cost: 2 Evos - Description: Has a melee attack and the ability to jump off walls. This allows the Marauder to gather great speed in enclosed areas. Name: Advanced Marauder: Stage needed to obtain: 2 - Cost: 3 Evos - Description: The Advanced Marauder has all of the abilities of the base Marauder including an area effect electric shock. Name: Dragoon - Stage needed to obtain: 1 - Cost: 3 Evos - Description: Possesses a melee attack and a pounce ability (can be used as an attack or a way to reach a remote area inaccessible from the ground. Name: Advanced Dragoon - Stage needed to obtain: 3 - Cost: 4 Evos - Description: In addition to the basic Dragoon abilities, the Advanced Dragoon has 3 barbs which may be used to attack humans from a distance. Name: Tyrant: - Stage needed to obtain: 3 - Cost: 5 Evos - Description: Provides a healing aura in which nearby aliens regenerate health faster than usual. As well as being equipped with a melee attack, this class can charge at enemy humans and structures while inflicting great damage. Human Weapons The humans make use of an armory to purchase new weapons. The weapons cost credits, which are primarily gained by killing aliens. While a human loses whatever weapon he had upon death, He does not lose his credits. All humans make the choice to either spawn with a rifle or a construction kit, and all humans permanently have a weak "blaster" pistol equipped as a secondary weapon. Mods Due to being fully open sourced, and built in the quake engine, it is incredibly easy for the owners of servers to edit, compile, and run modifications to the base gameplay on the server. number of non server run visual and graphical mods also exist, though servers have full control on whether such mods may be used using purity settings. In addition to server sided gameplay mods, and server/client sided graphical mods, the also exist several custom clients and HuDs for the game that get rid of bugs, allow for an extended range of options, and allow each individual to generate their own GUID for purposes of maintaining unique identities with dynamic IPs. Trivia *Tremulous was based on gloom, a quake2 modification. *Though it runs in the quake3 engine, it is a standalone game and does not require quake 3, nor share any weapons/classes with it. *As of 2009, tremulous garnered a higher average population than any other version of quake 3, including the unmodded quake 3. *While Darklegion had not done much official support in years, the community itself kept the game up to date with mods, and it continues to be modded to a large extent, due to the quake and tremulous engines being completely open source, and the community supporting advanced guides for creating and compiling mods in windows, mac, and linux. *tremulous won the ModDB standalone game of the year award in 2007 External links *The official forums for tremulous *Largest map/patch/mod database for tremulous *active tremulous irc channel on freenode Category:Games Category:3D games Category:2003 games Category:FPS games Category:Mac games Category:Linux games Category:Multiplayer games Category:Mods Category:Open-source games